Meta Ethics Flashcards
What is Meta Ethics?
What determines how we know what is wrong and what is right - if moral values are objective or subjective?
What are the cognitive (factual) ethical theories?
Naturalism:
* Utilitarianism
* Situation Ethics
* Virtue Ethics
* Natural Moral Law
Non-Naturalism:
* Intuitionism
* Divine Command Theory
What are the non-cognitive (non-factual) ethical theories?
Emotivism
What is ethical naturalism?
The view that moral values can be described in terms of natural properties (e.g. pleasure, pain, personal qualities)
What is ethical non-naturalism?
The view that moral values are based on non-natural facts
What is Utilitarianism?
Bentham:
* Pleasure and pain determine what motivates and directs our lives, and also determines what ought to do so
* Use of pleasure and pain in order to determine moral rightness and wrongness
What is Intuitionism?
G.E. Moore:
* Our knowledge of right and wrong comes from our fundamental objective moral intuitions
* Intuitionism is how people choose between conflicting duties
W.D. Ross:
* The duties that we must instinctively do are ‘prima facie’ which means at first sight - each duty is absolute…
* … however, if there are conflicting duties - we must use our moral intuition to decide what to do
What is Divine Command Theory?
- A religious theory of ethics
- Suggests moral commands come from God
- Whatever God commands must be good - what he forbids must be evil
- Right and wrong is derived from the obedience to the will of God
- Adam and Eve’s fall mean that humans are reliant on God’s grace to have any understanding between right and wrong
- Bible is the absolute authority that we must adhere to
John Calvin:
* The DCT is a natural result from the supreme power of God
Karl Barth:
* Humanity’s obedience to God is the answer to all ethical questions
What is the Euthyphro Dilemma?
Challenges the DCT by questioning:
* Is conduct right because God commands it? - Accepting this will lead to God losing His omnibenevolence
* Or does God command conduct because it is right? - Accepting this will lead to God losing His omnipotence
What is Emotivism?
A.J. Ayer:
* Moral statements are nothing more than expressions of emotion - what Ayer called ‘emotive ejaculations’
* Moral statements can be reduced to statements of approval or disapproval
* Morality is subjective - not objective
What is the naturalistic fallacy?
- ‘Ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’
- Problem with naturalistic ethical theories
- We cannot derive moral values from facts
- e.g. ‘She is old and lonely (fact) => ‘Therefore you ought to help her (moral value)’
What are the strengths + weaknesses of ethical naturalism?
Strengths:
* Ethical propositions are true because they are factual since they reduce to non-ethical properties about the world
* Right and wrong are real and objective, therefore we can know if we are doing right or wrong
* Objective morality provides solid guidelines for us to follow
Weaknesses:
* A.J. Ayer would argue that statements which cannot be verified or falsified are meaningless - which applies to all naturalistic claims such as ‘Murder is wrong’
* The naturalistic fallacy
What are the strengths + weaknesses of Intuitionism?
Strengths:
* Objective morality provides solid guidelines for us to follow
* It overcomes the problem of disagreement between the conflict of what is right and wrong with ethical theories (is it pleasure and pain, or is it the primary precepts?)
* It can be applied universally as many people share the same moral intuitions - for instance, most people have the intuitive sense that murder is wrong, however, killing someone in self defence is not wrong
Weaknesses:
* It isn’t logical to base what is wrong and what is right on an indefinable theory - it could be thought as a circular theory, as we use ‘intuition’ to decide that our ‘intuition’ is what decides what is right and wrong
* It is ethnocentric to assume that all people share the same innate moral intuitions and empirically false - as many people may have differing views, and - for instance - not everyone believes that murder is wrong. Rather, moral values are nothing more than the product of psychological and sociological conditioning
* If there are conflicting intuitions, it hypocritically makes the theory unclear and provides guidelines that are no longer ‘solid’
What are the strengths + weaknesses of Divine Command Theory?
Strengths:
* Christians believe that God’s factual attributes (omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience) show that His commands must be right
* The deontological nature of DCT means that God’s rules are absolute and universal, which avoids the problem of relativism
* The system is clear and straightforward
* Many Christians link God’s moral commands with the promise of life after death - providing a secure eschatalogical end-goal to morality
Weaknesses:
* We don’t have any original version of the Bible, and therefore can’t tell if they’ve been tampered with or not - as God has given them or changed
* Certain commandments could have been lost or changed in translation which highlights how unreliable the DCT is a an ethical theory
* The Bible contains extremely immoral (to most people) commands, such as forbidding homosexual behaviour, and permitting slavery
* There isn’t much freedom with DCT, as the threat of hell and the promise of heaven restricts people’s beliefs and could tie them down to the DCT
* The Euthyphro Dilemma
